Nehad Selaiha pays homage to who suddenly died of a heart attack on 28 August at the age of 69 His close friends used to kid him about his extraordinarily long eyelashes, declaring no female could ever resist them. In the junior staff room of the English Department at Cairo University, in the early 1960s, the hilarity broke through the stiff academic atmosphere and the solid oak door and spilt into the corridor outside where students could hear it. The young Hammoudah would sheepishly smile, in a mixture of vexed shyness and embarrassed pride, and try to stem the tide of laughter by loudly accusing his friends of jealousy and downright envy. Years later, his wife and life-long partner, Hayam Youssef -- an energetic and level-headed young graduate from Port Said -- would frown disapprovingly on such antics, berate the company with mock sternness for making so light of such a serious matter, and end up asserting, in a voice that bubbled with suppressed laughter, that it was them lashes that did it all, clinching the affair between her and Hammoudah and binding them for life. Neither Sally, an associate professor of English at Cairo University, Reem, an engineer, nor Ahmed, a medical doctor -- their wonderful offspring -- would have seen the light of day were it not for those lashes. Hammoudah kept those lashes well into his sixties and, curiously, he always looked the same. Even the bald scalp was there when I first saw him in 1962. He was one of those people who never seem to age, whose general mien seems to finally settle and get fixed at quite an early age. Slim, straight and gaunt, like a slender water reed, he had the restless energy and fiery enthusiasm of a young man and his skin always reminded me of an ageless, sun-baked parchment which could admit no further wrinkles or time markers. When I jocularly told him this on a recent occasion, as we were sipping coffee before a doctoral viva at the Academy of Arts where he often acted as external examiner, he smiled and told me with captivating earnestness, that it was, perhaps, the peasant in him. "Peasants wrinkle early," he said, "then never look any older." Coming from a rural background, an old peasant stock, Hammoudah worked his way up the social and academic ladder with unyielding stamina and great determination, building a brilliant career. From a promising instructor at the English Department of Cairo University, he developed into full professor (after a five-year scholarship at Cornell University), head of that department, then dean of the whole Faculty of Arts -- a position once occupied by the great Taha Hussein, a fact of which Hammoudah was immensely proud. As dean in the turbulent 1980s, when the tide of religious fundamentalism was on the rise and its supporters among the student body were gaining in power and claiming a right to interfere in all aspects of university life, Hammoudah had to fight many battles to safeguard the integrity and independence of this old academic establishment. At one point, the fight went beyond the university walls and became a public issue. This happened when a demand for an inquiry into the propriety of teaching Tayeb Salih's novel Mawsem Al-Hijra Ila Al-Shamal ( Season of Migration to the North ) to undergraduates at the Faculty of Arts was submitted to the People's Assembly. In the submission, launched by some irate deputies, egged on, no doubt, by agents of the militant Islamic groups in the university, this classic of modern Arabic literature was described as a licentious, immoral work, unfit for perusal by young female students and intended to corrupt their minds. It fell to Hammoudah, as dean of the Faculty of Arts, to defend the novel and, with it, the whole future of university education and academic research in Egypt. As he fought this battle, he knew he was fighting for the independence of academia, its intellectual integrity and freedom of thought. In those bleak, depressing days, he often quoted the example of his predecessor, Taha Hussein, remembering how in 1926 he was vilified by Al-Azhar then taken to court and prosecuted over his book Fil Shi'r Al-Jahili (On Pre-Islamic Poetry). That Taha Hussein could weather the storm and emerge victorious and unshaken was a great morale booster and source of encouragement for Hammoudah. Eventually he won the battle, but not before it had taken a heavy toll of his health and made his heart weak and vulnerable. Hammoudah often compared this battle to a big drama where much more than the destiny of one individual or his career were at stake. It was a public performance which demanded more arduous planning, intricate stage-directing and oratorical prowess than any of the plays he was writing at the time, and it earned him more approbation and personal satisfaction than any of even the most successful of them. Conscientiously disciplined, frugal, hardworking and transparently, almost naively honest, Hammoudah looked like the last thing you could relate to the conventional image of the 'artist' in those days. Unlike his closest colleagues who wanted to be artists, influential public figures and also competent academics, all at the same time, Hammoudah, though harbouring the same ambition, humbly realised that he could only be and do one thing at a time. In the earlier, formative years, he kept his artistic side well under control, allowing it only to emerge after he got his doctorate and secured his position in academia. When he judged that the time was ripe, he acted like a typical peasant, first preparing the land and turning its insides out to the sun before planting the seeds. This process took the form of several books in which he thought through his ideas about art and theatre: ' Ilm Al-Jamal (Aesthetics) and Al-Naqd Al-Hadith (The New Criticism), both in 1963, Al-Masrah Al-Siyasi (Political Theatre) in 1971, and Masrah (The Theatre of) Rashad Rushdi, in 1972. The last of these early treatises was a profound and loving analytical study of the plays of his mentor and benefactor, Rashad Rushdi, the first Egyptian to head the English Department at Cairo University who was directly responsible for appointing many Egyptians of humble origins, including Hammoudah, as members of staff. Rushdi also initiated the first Egyptian theatre magazine in 1964, creating a public space which theatre scholars could share with theatre practitioners and provide a solid, supportive critical base for the movement of theatrical revival. Hammoudah, however, was only part of the magazine for a short while since he had to leave, in the same year, for the States to read for a PhD in drama at Cornell University. On his return, in 1969, he produced an impressive, theoretical study of dramatic structure, called Al-Bina' Al-Drami (Dramatic Structure), then threw himself headlong into the turmoil of playwriting, producing six political plays in quick succession. For his first play, Al-Nas fi Tibah (People in Thebes), staged at Al-Tali'a in 1981 by Sayed Tuleib, Hammoudah picked the old Isis/Osiris myth and turned it upside down, presenting Osiris as an idealistic, benevolent dictator who did everything in his power to improve the lot of his people but always treated them as helpless children, never allowing them to assume responsibility for themselves, and his beloved wife, Isis, as a treacherous, grasping and power-hungry queen, in collusion with Seth against the good Osiris. In power politics, the play suggests, ethics have no place, and all the achievements of dictators cannot survive them since their people have never been taught to be any other than helpless dependents, always ready to hail the next ruler. Predictably, the play proved hotly controversial, not only on account of its implied criticism of Nasser, who had just died, but also because of its iconoclastic treatment of the ancient myth. For weeks, critics belligerently debated the right of the artist to tamper with the cultural heritage and its hallowed, almost sacrosanct narratives and figures to meet his ends. Hammoudah had meant to launch a drastic assault on all inherited myths and the very mode of mythological thinking, and the play was meant to be profoundly political -- a ruthless satirical criticism of the Egyptian people's good- natured credulity and uncritical acceptance of the myths propagated by those in authority. Hence its original, full ironical title: Al-Nas fi Tiba Tayeboun (The People in Good Thebes are Good People) which was truncated by the censor to only its first half. Undaunted by the hostile reception of his debut work, Hammoudah went on to produce four more aggressive satires: Al-Raha'en (Hostages), a transparent allegory satirising the Russian domination of Egyptian politics in the 1960s in the name of supporting liberation movements in the third world, directed with enormous success by Fahmi El-Kholi for the Modern Theatre Company at Al-Salaam Theatre in 1982; Lailat Al-Colonel Al-Akhira (The Last Night of the Colonel), 1983, about the destructive power struggle among the military junta who staged the 1952 coup d'etat and, understandably, never staged; Al-Zaher Beibars, written in 1984 to sort out the confusion in the minds of Egyptians between the two contradictory images of Nasser both as popular hero and ruthless dictator, and staged at the National by Ahmed Zaki in 1988 as Ibn Al-Balad (The Local Leader, or Son of the Country); and, finally, Al-Muqawil (The Contractor), a variation on The Last Night of the Colonel, this time with strong echoes from Ibsen's The Master Builder and Sadat, with his laissez-fair economic policy, rather than Nasser with his spurious socialism, as the target of attack. Like The Colonel, The Contractor has never, so far, been staged. Political theatre was Hammoudah's forte and allowed him to experiment with many conventional and modernist techniques, ranging from allegory and fantasy to epic theatre and indigenous folk theatrical modes. But whatever dramatic forms and theatrical techniques Hammoudah used, his plays have remained, by dint of the topicality of their content and their savagely satirical drive, an unsafe bet for directors and source of heated argumentation for critics and audiences. The 1990s marked the end of Hammoudah's forays into drama and the beginning of a new, equally productive and contentious stage. In 1989, he was appointed Egypt's cultural counselor in the United States, the country where he had studied in the 1960s and at the end of his office, in 1993, he was invited to act as deputy head of Al-Ain University in the United Arab Emirates. Over sixty by then, and so far away, it seemed that Hammoudah had finally settled down to a mildly active academic existence. Soon enough, however, his friends and opponents alike discovered that all the time he was away and they thought he was enjoying an idyllic life, he had been refurbishing his critical arsenal and preparing for a new battle. The three books he published upon his return: Al-Maraya Al-Muhadabah and Al-Maraya Al-Muqa'ara (Concave and Convex Mirrors), and Al-Khoroug min Al-Tih (Coming out of the Labyrinth) constituted an integrated critical project in which the first book surveyed the contemporary Egyptian critical scene, torn between conflicting directions, old and new, local and imported; the second analysed and deconstructed the imported theories, tearing them to pieces and arguing for their inherent humanistic nihilism and unfitness for the Arab outlook on existence; and the third called for the establishment of an Arab analytical method and critical theory, based on the contributions of ancient Arab scholars in this field. It seems that Hammoudah was destined to whip up hot critical storms wherever he went and whether he played dramatist, teacher, dean, critic or literary scholar. His plays, articles and scholarly works were often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and invariably aroused wide and far-reaching controversy. His students, however, and they are numberless, as well as his colleagues, even those who did not see eye to eye with him, will always remember him as an honest, modest, sweetly courteous and generously compassionate human being. And how we shall all miss him.
